Part of any good traveling experience is culinary; sampling the local cuisine even if it’s only different versions of things you have at home is always advised. 
This is especially true in a place like Washington where just about any
nationality you can think of is represented in some way. With a little effort you can find whatever suits you here, and some things that are woefully gross and you’d do better to avoid.
On this trip it just so happened that my first experience dining out was at an old favorite – Full Kee in Chinatown. Now, I am going to complain about Full Kee. And many of you are going to cock your heads to one side and say, ‘Dear boy, you bought Chinese food in Chinatown. What did you expect?’ But to those of you I say that there have been many times when I was the only gringo in the place (whatever the Chinese version of gringo is) and I was able to order very good family style Cantonese food here. A few months ago it was here that I
enjoyed the best bowl of noodles with brisket that I’ve ever had. This time I was disappointed with the Pan Fried Noodles w/ Shrimp ($8) I ordered, which were largely tasteless and cool. I’d definitely go again, but I think the trick here is to ask for what the kitchen staff or servers might eat, as I did with the noodles last time. I had better luck and an adventure of sorts. [ed. note: Full Kee underwent renovations and a change in ownership last year, and may still be sorting things out]
After the theater the original plan was to have dinner at a smallish Italian place near the KC whose name escapes me. Due to a dinner crunch we ended up calling ahead to the Circle Bistro, which serves a large French menu to guests of the Washington Circle Hotel and anyone else looking for a very pleasant meal in a refined
atmosphere. Several members of my party ordered the Yukon Gold Potato Gnocchi ($19), which arrived in a shallow dish with Fall vegetables. A small sample revealed firm Gnocchi in a mild cream sauce, with hints of sage. I chose the Classic Tartare of Hereford Beef ($12), served with a paper cone of pomme frites. It was really very good, with the taste of fresh ultra-rare beef undercut slightly by quality capers.
Coffee junkies that we are, we spent quite a bit of time in coffee houses or places that cater to coffee house types. Tryst
is an old favorite, serving dozens of coffee drinks and teas in a sort of yard sale chic atmosphere. I had a good but very strong Egg Nog with Rum here. The food is pretty good as well, perfect for studying or reading with. Sandwiches, for instance, run $6-7 and are made on site by actual humans with quality ingredients. Two relative newcomers, looking to capitalize on the popularity of Tryst, are Open City and Busboys
+ Poets. I thought Open City had a delicious Soy Latte, then noticed why: all their coffee is roasted by and purchased from Tryst. (I’ve since been told they’re actually owned by Tryst.) Busboys + Poets has the same intricate tea services as Tryst, with a large stage in back for the inevitable poetry slam. All these places make it clear that it’s really difficult to get a lousy cup of Joe in DC except for in the Dirksen cafeteria.
Utopia is in a row house in the U District, and has really made an effort to leave some lasting mark on the neighborhood with a sort of Afro-Cuban decor and live jazz when we visited. I pounce on good Mussels when they’re in season (months ending in “R”, kids…) so I had to try them in Lemon Caper Cream sauce. I really didn\’t expect the sauce to be as good as it was; complex, a bit sweet, and completely worth the untold hours on the treadmill it will take to make it (and the two pieces of bread that soaked it up) go away. I think I\’ll be mentally filing Utopia away as a place to return to later.
In addition to all the places in DC to dine where one is expected to dress as if they just climbed out of the Banana Republic window, there are other very tasty and far less formal spots, like Julia’s
Empanadas. There are three in various spots in the city but my favorite is on 18th NW across from Madam’s Organ. It’s really hard to be elitist about the favorite cuisine of labor union organizers and socialist revolutionaries that’s best eaten with two hands and a Guava juice. The window outside purports that each is “handmade with love,” and I’d believe it. For looks the little pastry pouches can’t be beat, and the taste is a delicious break from the normal bland pub food.
Also in Adam’s Morgan is the fantastic Amsterdam
Falafel. Like Julia’s, Amsterdam caters to the late night crowd of revelers with simple fare. Serving only three main items—a small falafel, regular falafel, and pomes frites – in the upstairs of a small row house, Amsterdam does what it does very well. Each falafel is crunchy on the outside and surprisingly flavorful inside. Served plain, it’s up to you to decide what you’d like from a bar of toppings including tahini and other made on-site relishes and chiffonades. I especially love the jalapeno and cilantro herb relish. While I love a nice – as we say in the south, ‘sit-down’ meal – sometimes eating from a paper pouch while you walk down 18th is a lot of fun. Julia’s and Amsterdam are an absolute must when I’m in Washington, and for comfort food they’ve got my vote.
This was written by guest contributer NMJ.
I’m walking through the airport and what do I see?
“Put a shrimp on the Barbie” has somehow become the quintessential American phrase to describe Australia. Which makes no sense at all. First of all, Australians mimic their mother country in using the word ‘prawn’ to describe those crunchy crustaceans. And second of all, it’s impossible to imagine an Australian eating anything but fried potatoes covered in sweet chili sauce, or reheated, plastic-wrapped meat pies. Oh, and really really mediocre and expensive fusion.
Here, as in all of Australia, the trick is to stay simple. All snobbiness aside, anything more complicated than frying or boiling seems to confound most Australian chefs. The open scallops and poached blue-eye at the swank behemoth Mures Upper Deck, are fantastically unmemorable, but the fish and chips at Fish Frenzy on Elizabeth Street Pier are perfect: hot and slippery and crunchy; covered in fresh beer batter or crumbed (which apparently means ‘covered in crumbs’).
Nothing can make you scream “Vacation!” more quickly than the prospect of a FREEEE hotel, so when my sister was tapped to present a paper at an engineering conference in Orlando, I quickly hopped on for the ride. The result was four manic days and four late nights in what bills itself as the most magical place on earth.
Coober Pedy. In the local Aboriginal dialect it means ‘White man’s hole in the ground’. And there’s a reason for that: the 2700 miners who call ‘the Opal capital of the world’ their home reside on top of, around, and often underneath the conical mountains of white waste-soil from earlier generations. This means that million dollar finds are often attributed to hollowing out a bedroom.
I’m not sure who Tom and Mary were but the actual owners are Anastasios and Maria Klosses. They’ve been cooking in one location or another since they arrived for the second opal rush 15 years ago, and unlike most of the town, this incarnation of the taverna is built above ground. Huge feta and olive salads, fabulously aromatic lamb, and grizzled old men with beards down to their belts and steel-toed workboots knocking back unlabeled beer like they don’t want to live, all combine to give the dining room a really cosy feel.
No one but the phlegmatic English could have invented something as obnoxiously bland as Yorkshire pudding, and tapas could only come from a culture that needed to support the late-night Spanish drinking habit. No early Japanese foody would ever tolerate a cuisine less obsessively anal than sushi.
About forty five minutes later we had a really decent loaf of heavy, crusty bread to go with our dinner of beer, more beer, and a different type of beer.
Who the hell would rollerblade across the Australian red center? The Swiss, that’s who. And when they blow out a tire four hours north of Alice Springs, their only choice is to hitchhike with whatever crazy Americans happen to drive by on a food tour down the Stuart Highway.
There was a uninspiring cabernet and shiraz mix, and a Riesling so dry that it could have been used for salad dressing. But that didn’t matter because Red Center Farm’s real export is Mango wines.
Like a mirage in the Australian outback desert, Fran’s 
“I’ve just pulled a buffalo chili and cheese pie out of the oven.” says Fran. We are told, matter of fact, that we should have a pie and a scone so we could try both.
Larrimah’s official population is 20. It’s unofficial population, best I can tell, is Fran, her husband, her daughter, and her grandkids. There’s little else around beside’s the Tea House, but Fran’s is more than enough to warrant an entire township.
There are three ways of getting an extra star for your hotel’s rating, and only one of them involves nice facilities and good service. Of the remaining two, the only legal choice is to add on extra restaurants, pools, and other random-assed stuff ‘til the judges just cave in from embarrassment. It doesn’t matter if you’ve converted the janitor’s closet into a computer center by storing the fax machine there; that line in your brochure means an automatic extra star for you.
When people claim to be self-taught on a certain subject, most often they actually mean one of two things: 1) ‘Yeah, I went to school for it but it doesn’t count ‘cause they didn’t really teach me anything; or 2) ‘I have huge gaps in my knowledge base.’ Zaf is guilty of both answers, and with her current hand-to-mouth-ism she isn’t getting to the culinary institute of NY any time soon. There was only one thing to do- learn it on the cheap in Vietnam.
to give correct change. Why? Because every single store was pushing cheap silk knockoffs of last years J Crew catalog, made while you wait. So when I say ‘finding one was tough’, what I actually mean was ‘I deeply regret that I was forced to stop and buy a silk shirt every five feet.’
All the while getting pushed, cursed at, and stepped on by tiny ladies with yolks of soup and peanuts slung over their shoulders and baskets of lettuces and fish and kids stacked high on their heads.
The school turned out to be a restaurant with an extra big gazebo out in front overhanging the river. For Vietnam, land of the impromptu and jerry-rigged, it was surprisingly well done. We each had our own stove, all utensils were provided, and there was no lack of demonstrators, dish washers, people to make sure we didn’t light ourselves on fire, and a translator to explain it all.
The menu was a warm squid salad, roasted fish, eggplant stew in clay pots, yellow vegetable pancakes, and finally, homemade rice wrappers to use for spring rolls. These last things were so damn hard that not a single one of us got the bamboo flippy-motion the first time around; mess ups and waste water were thrown directly into river.